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myWidgetTheme WP theme

The last couple of days I have been developing a theme for WordPress. I was asked to find a CMS for a small website project creating a intranet site for employees at a relative big company. They wanted a new fresh and light design, but most importantly, it had to be easy to customize and maintain content.

I asked what kind of functions it should have and what kind of design they wanted since this is really important when developing the design and funtionality. They wanted 4-5 widget like frames with some content on the frontpage, and then one link to a news page in the main navigation area. The content will be a list a list of news articles, the weather, list of their new projects and pictures of them as well and some other stuff.

As a long time WordPress developer (I have customized several themes for different purposes) I came up with the idea of using WordPress using a theme with two wide sidebars with widgets on the frontpage and then two smaller sidebars surrounding the content on the other pages. One of my collegees hinted about the CSS Tricks website and fortunately Chris Coyier (the owner of CSS Tricks) had made a series of video tutorials about designing for WordPress from scratch using the Starker theme. In the tutorials he made a theme from scratch and since this theme had the kind of widget design that I wanted I used his theme as base of my costumization.

I took away the middle collumn on the frontpage and made the sidebars wider. Then I widgetized the sidebars to be able to add content from the widget admin interface. I added another two sidebars to be used on all other pages. I then added a page widget template that can be used with Query Posts + Widget Logic plugins to be able to make a page with posts. At last I tweeked the CSS and discarded the pictures used for widget titles and blog title. I did not change any of the colors, but I might do that in futures versions.

The theme is now used on this site to show its possibilities. If you like the theme, it is available in the download section… and feel free to customize it all you like! :D